Reading about Miles Morales
My partner Doug found this wonderful interview with the creator of the Miles Morales Spiderman. It talks about why he made a mixed-race Spiderman and what superheroes mean to the audience. Some thoughts ...
"It's a story with a very strong theme: "With great power comes great responsibility." And that theme is so perfect in its simplicity that you could build a religion around it. As a fan, I carried it around with me, but when you start writing it, you realize, Oh, this is the most important lesson in the world. It's not a superpower lesson. It's a lesson about power, itself. If you have the power to sing, or to grab people's attention, or anything, then with that comes responsibility that you need to identify and raise yourself up to."
Agreed. This is part of my personal code of honor. Your responsibility always matches your power. If you don't have any power, you're not responsible for anything in that area. Wherever you do have power, you are responsible for using it well.
"The most cosmetic change we made, obviously, is a couple of years ago when we made the determination that, if Spider-Man were created today, there's a very large percentage chance that, based on where he's living and who he is, that he would be a person of color. So we made the choice to send Peter Parker off with a heroic death and have a new young man take the mantle in the form of Miles Morales, who’s half Hispanic and half African-American."
I think this is incredibly important. It makes me want to buy the comics, not just because I love the character concept, but because I want to encourage and support that kind of writing -- where someone actually looks at the world, asks what it needs, and also takes into consideration real facts such as demographics. I do this in my writing. It's not just about creating diversity. It's about matching the local color of a specific area if that's what you're writing about. Frex, my Walking the Beat is set in Jamaica Plain, and there are some characters from the Dominican Republic because that's a local trend there.
"Now, you can't make these decisions [to be more inclusive] consciously, because then you're just writing in reaction to things, and that doesn't work out, dramatically. But subconsciously, if you look at the world around you and see your readers, you go, I wanna write something that I know is true. So you start writing women better and you write people outside of your experience better, because you look at pages of other people's comics and you don't recognize it as the world around you."
Actually, you CAN make a conscious decision to write more inclusive characters, or to change any other aspect of your writing. You can do whatever you want with it. If you're only writing to tick a representation box, it'll probably suck. But if you decide that you want to fill a gap, and make an honest effort to find out what's missing and fix that, then it'll probably be at least decent. Some people write intuitively, some logically. Some write things down, others make things up. It all works for somebody. Do what works for you -- and what is meaningful to you.
"Just yesterday, a woman wrote an article analyzing what she thought was a poor comic book cover, and she was met with just a bunch of shitty anonymous people being awful to her online. I think that a huge problem is people who read comics and don't understand the point of superheroes, which is to be the best version of yourself. You love Captain America? Well, you know what Captain America would never do? Go online anonymously and shit on a girl for having an opinion."
This is the whole point of cultural material in any medium: giving us a chance to imagine ourselves in other circumstances and how we would face the challenges that a character does. Stories can show us the best behavior or the worst behavior, and how that works out for a given character. I feel that we need superheroes in general, and the archetype of the Unsullied Hero in particular, to ring the gold bell at the top. And we also need terrifying villains to remind us of how awful people can be. A good story should make us think about the characters' choices, what they did and why, because that helps us make the right choices in our own lives.
Believe me, when you have very little time to make a very important decision, that mental practice matters. If you've done it before in your imagination, you're much better prepared to respond quickly and effectively when real life throws you a curve ball.
I feel that we need heroes for inspiration. They show us what the best behavior looks like. Maybe you can't lift a car like Captain America ... but you can open a door for someone with their hands full, and little things like that help make the world a better place too. Actions matter. Inspiration matters. Stories matter.
"It's a story with a very strong theme: "With great power comes great responsibility." And that theme is so perfect in its simplicity that you could build a religion around it. As a fan, I carried it around with me, but when you start writing it, you realize, Oh, this is the most important lesson in the world. It's not a superpower lesson. It's a lesson about power, itself. If you have the power to sing, or to grab people's attention, or anything, then with that comes responsibility that you need to identify and raise yourself up to."
Agreed. This is part of my personal code of honor. Your responsibility always matches your power. If you don't have any power, you're not responsible for anything in that area. Wherever you do have power, you are responsible for using it well.
"The most cosmetic change we made, obviously, is a couple of years ago when we made the determination that, if Spider-Man were created today, there's a very large percentage chance that, based on where he's living and who he is, that he would be a person of color. So we made the choice to send Peter Parker off with a heroic death and have a new young man take the mantle in the form of Miles Morales, who’s half Hispanic and half African-American."
I think this is incredibly important. It makes me want to buy the comics, not just because I love the character concept, but because I want to encourage and support that kind of writing -- where someone actually looks at the world, asks what it needs, and also takes into consideration real facts such as demographics. I do this in my writing. It's not just about creating diversity. It's about matching the local color of a specific area if that's what you're writing about. Frex, my Walking the Beat is set in Jamaica Plain, and there are some characters from the Dominican Republic because that's a local trend there.
"Now, you can't make these decisions [to be more inclusive] consciously, because then you're just writing in reaction to things, and that doesn't work out, dramatically. But subconsciously, if you look at the world around you and see your readers, you go, I wanna write something that I know is true. So you start writing women better and you write people outside of your experience better, because you look at pages of other people's comics and you don't recognize it as the world around you."
Actually, you CAN make a conscious decision to write more inclusive characters, or to change any other aspect of your writing. You can do whatever you want with it. If you're only writing to tick a representation box, it'll probably suck. But if you decide that you want to fill a gap, and make an honest effort to find out what's missing and fix that, then it'll probably be at least decent. Some people write intuitively, some logically. Some write things down, others make things up. It all works for somebody. Do what works for you -- and what is meaningful to you.
"Just yesterday, a woman wrote an article analyzing what she thought was a poor comic book cover, and she was met with just a bunch of shitty anonymous people being awful to her online. I think that a huge problem is people who read comics and don't understand the point of superheroes, which is to be the best version of yourself. You love Captain America? Well, you know what Captain America would never do? Go online anonymously and shit on a girl for having an opinion."
This is the whole point of cultural material in any medium: giving us a chance to imagine ourselves in other circumstances and how we would face the challenges that a character does. Stories can show us the best behavior or the worst behavior, and how that works out for a given character. I feel that we need superheroes in general, and the archetype of the Unsullied Hero in particular, to ring the gold bell at the top. And we also need terrifying villains to remind us of how awful people can be. A good story should make us think about the characters' choices, what they did and why, because that helps us make the right choices in our own lives.
Believe me, when you have very little time to make a very important decision, that mental practice matters. If you've done it before in your imagination, you're much better prepared to respond quickly and effectively when real life throws you a curve ball.
I feel that we need heroes for inspiration. They show us what the best behavior looks like. Maybe you can't lift a car like Captain America ... but you can open a door for someone with their hands full, and little things like that help make the world a better place too. Actions matter. Inspiration matters. Stories matter.